The meaning of children's first words. Evidence from the input

This study is an investigation into the meaning of the first words children acquire, through an examination of the input to the semantic learning device. An analysis of the way word meanings might be learned shows that (a) the set of words potentially learnable at the very onset of language acquisition is the set of words addressed to the child as single-word utterances, and (b) that the most likely description of the meaning children attribute to one-word utterances is in terms of the intentional communicative acts speakers perform in uttering these utterances. One-word utterances of 8 mothers to preverbal infants were analyzed for their communicative function. It was found that words appearing as one-word utterances in the input possess a high degree of function- specificity and even unifunctionality. The results imply that first word meanings children learn are probably rules for the lexicalization of specific communicative acts.